I tend to lose a good amount of games in which I’ve obtained a clear advantage. What usually happens is that I am low on time and miss more or less immediate threats posed by my opponent. To avoid such frustrating losses, a chess club colleague of mine suggested that I make general consolidation moves before pressing the advantage. One example for such a move is Kg2 in the position below. Rather than giving Black an opportunity to invade the king’s vicinity with devastating effect, White protects the intrusion square h3, solidifying the King’s defence and forcing Black to come up with a less direct attacking scheme.

Of course, the chunk that’s shown in this gif is related to a common mating pattern of Queen + Bishop, e.g. this one:

I’ve borrowed Vukovic’s The Art of Attack from the library. His introduction to the attack against the castled king has a section on mating patterns. I think this is a good opportunity to make some gifs reviewing some of these patterns.

Two Knights Mate

Arabian Mate (pawn variation)

Damiano’s Mate

Bishop and Queen Discovery Mate

Quiet Bishop and Queen Discovery Mate (this coincidentally featured in one of LinuxGuy’s games recently)

WordPress has been acting up by refusing to display gif-animations. I was able to fix it by removing the height/width specification from the HTML source, but since I was using the original height, anyway, I fail to see why that should have messed with the gifs in the first place. Anyhow, here for testing purposes I provide you with another mate, one of the oldest in chess history, the “Arabian Mate”. Enjoy!